The Execution of Sherlock Holmes (11 page)

Next evening I had an unexpected visit after dinner from Mycroft Holmes. His mood was partly one of annoyance at the game his brother seemed to be playing with us all and partly a real concern for the safety of that brother’s life.

‘I had it out with Inspector Lestrade this afternoon,’ he said aggressively, throwing off his coat and sitting down by the fire. ‘He and his people are subordinate to us in the hierarchy of government, which is sometimes rather useful. All the same, in my position it does me no good, you know, to have Sherlock playing the fool all over London.’

He was plainly very agitated and got up at once. Pacing round the room, he paused to wave a hand at the chemical table, sadly unused in recent weeks.

‘Why can he not settle to something worthwhile? What does he see in all this trumpery? You will find one day these escapades will land us all in chancery.’

‘I wish he was here so that I could ask him what he sees in it,’ I said sadly.

This seemed to mollify him. He poured himself whisky from the decanter, added a dash of seltzer, and sat down again.

‘I came tonight, Watson, because Lestrade told me something this afternoon. It sounds to me like a tale from a schoolboy’s magazine, but you ought to hear it.’

‘I should like to.’

‘Very well. Lestrade spoke of some business a few years ago. Three men were killed in England, all from the same family. Name of Openshaw.’

‘The case of the five orange pips.’ He pulled a face.

‘Call it what you like. Rumour says, according to Lestrade, that each of them received an envelope containing five orange pips. This was to tell him he had been chosen for assassination. A boys’ magazine story, pure and simple!’

‘But what of it?’

‘A criminal gang came from the United States, from the state of Georgia. Its members belonged to what is called the Ku Klux Klan and its leader was Captain James Calhoun.’

‘Quite correct,’ I said helpfully. ‘Calhoun escaped from England after the murders, but his ship, the
Lone Star
, went down in an Atlantic gale that autumn. The sternpost was found floating, all that remained of the vessel.’

‘No!’ He slapped his knee.

‘I fear you must explain that,’ I said cautiously.

‘According to Lestrade, that was what the world was meant to think. Captain James Calhoun was not dead then—but he is now.’

‘I don’t understand that.’

Mycroft Holmes sighed, as if despairing of me.

‘Lestrade has it on the authority of an American treasury agent with whom he has had professional dealings. Whatever you and my brother may think, the U.S. Treasury never believed Calhoun was lost at sea. A sternpost! The whole thing was only too easy to arrange. Calhoun has operated since then under assumed names, closely protected by his criminal organization. A treasury man working incognito was able to attend a grand council, or whatever it may be, of this Ku Klux Klan. He identified Calhoun as being present.’

‘But Calhoun is dead now?’

Mycroft Holmes stretched his feet toward the fire, a mannerism he shared with his brother.

‘He is dead now, quite recently. But the curious thing, according to Lestrade’s information, is that he is said to have died in England.’

I seemed to hear the voice of Sherlock Holmes cautioning silence and said only, ‘An odd story.’

Mycroft Holmes laughed, a thing he seldom did. Then he poked the fire irritably.

‘Odder than you suppose. According to Lestrade’s story, Calhoun was killed in London—murdered, presumably—and yet there is no body.’

There is no body! I thought of Henry Caius Milverton, for whom there was also no body, merely a jar of ashes. Once again I kept this to myself. However, I offered a lame explanation.

‘Your brother merely presumed that Calhoun had gone down with his ship. He did not regard it as proven fact.’

Mycroft Holmes raised his flourishing eyebrows.

‘Merely presumed, did he? It is not like Sherlock merely to presume. He is so damnably sure of himself as to be insufferable. When you see him, you had better pass on the information. Tell me, Doctor, are you sure that you know nothing of my brother’s whereabouts?’

‘Quite sure,’ I said humbly. He lumbered to his feet.

‘It really won’t do to have him acting the goat all over London as he seems to do at present. A one-armed beggar! You can tell him; it seems he listens to you. He will damage reputations other than his own. What’s more, it doesn’t do for him to be always hobnobbing with men further down the hierarchy, Lestrade and the like. Tell him when you see him.’

‘You may be sure I will.’

With that, he plodded down the stairs to the cab, whose horse and driver had waited patiently throughout his visit. And so Brother Mycroft began his stately progress back to that little world of his own, where the sun rises each morning over the Palace of Whitehall and sets every evening behind St. James’s Street. Beyond that, for him, lies outer darkness.

If two such men as Henry Caius Milverton and James Calhoun had died without a body between them, there was surely much more to the story of Newgate. On the following morning there was no copy of the
Times
. The
Morning Post
appeared as usual. I read it over my coffee and toast, folded it, and laid it down. Only then did I notice that where the penciled address ‘221b Baker Street’ should have been, someone had written ‘23 Denmark Square,
EC
.’

From my days as a medical student I knew Denmark Square, just off the City Road where it runs down toward Finsbury Pavement. It is not the most salubrious part of London—shabby terraces with a dusty patch of grass and a few stunted trees at its centre. I took sheet 53 of the Ordnance Survey map of London from the shelf and confirmed that 23 Denmark Square was the southernmost house of the terrace forming the eastern side of the square. On the reverse of the sheet are lists of those businesses that occupy premises on the map. At 23 Denmark Square, on the ground floor, was James Pocock
&
Son, pianoforte action makers and repairers of musical instruments.

It seemed I now knew where I might find Sherlock Holmes. But was he hiding there, held captive, or merely awaiting my arrival? Surely it was better to go at once than to delay and find that I had come too late. An hour later, I took the Metropolitan Line from Baker Street to Liverpool Street, through smoky tunnels and in such crowds that I could not tell if I was being followed or not. The carriages rattled along a deep canyon with embankments of brick on either side. Above us were blocks of warehouses, a gasworks with tall chimneys like minarets. The fiery mouth of an open retort glowed like the crater of a volcano.

The City Road is lined with dirty unpainted buildings and choked by heavy drays and baggage carts. Ramshackle oyster bars and little drinking shops with grimy uncurtained windows were well patronized by early morning. I turned into Denmark Square. The decaying houses were tall enough to have accommodated at first the prosperous families of a lawyer, a bill broker, a merchant of India rubber or Norwegian timber. Now the handsome terraces were sooty tenements with a different family in every room above the ground-floor workshops.

At the centre of the square was an area of grass worn brown by the crisscrossing of footsteps and two chestnut trees not yet come into leaf and looking as if they never might. I took my seat on a bench at the centre of this dusty isolation. I had not seen anyone following me—but then I did not suppose that I should.

I took out a paper and began to read. The rumble of carts, cabs, and twopenny buses from City Road was constant. Scales and arpeggios rose from the premises of the piano action manufacturer. Repairing violins is a considerable part of such trades, and a craftsman began to tune and play, simply at first and then with flowing confidence.

As I sat there, I lost interest in my newspaper, my thoughts filled by the nobility of such sounds in a place as desolate as this. But what was the music? I would guess the composer was Bach. A theme wove and inter wove a rich tapestry of sound that became an advancing wall of sublime melody in counter point. I had no doubt who was playing that gimcrack violin, and I thanked heaven Holmes kept his musical accomplishments secret from enemies and allies alike. This was not his beloved Stradivarius, but Holmes could conjure celestial harmonies from a tinker’s fiddle. The performance was not intended to ease my mind or lift my spirits. When my friend was engaged upon an inquiry, everything pointed to one end.

A simple theme had begun this majestic fugue. Now, as it wove in and out of the music, I half recognized it. I almost snatched hold of it, only to feel it slip away. I knew it, I could swear I did, but I am not knowledgeable enough to tell one of Bach’s fugues from the other. Perhaps I had heard it in company with Holmes at a St. James’s Hall recital.

The great tapestry of sound mellowed and softened, gathering for the grandeur of its conclusion, sunset clouds weaving together, dissolving and combining in sonorous triumph, a minor key moving into position for a final sublime chord in the major. Very softly the elusive theme was stated alone and I knew what it was. Indeed, I sang it softly to myself as I listened.

Half a pound of tuppeny rice, half a pound of treacle,

That’s the way the money goes, pop goes the weasel!

Who but Holmes could make something so splendid out of material so simple? But there was more, to remind me of the second verse of the old nursery rhyme.

Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle …

The Eagle! That famous tavern in the City Road was close to where I sat. As a medical student at Bart’s, the oldest hospital in the City of London, I had known the promenade bar with its music hall, garden orchesta, magic mirrors, French ropedancers, and infant prodigies! The nursery rhyme figured in our boisterous singsongs. I had often reminisced to Holmes about those days.

I got up, as if I had been merely sitting to pass the time, and took a roundabout route to Shepherdess Walk and the tavern, all yellow London brick above and gold paint on black at eye level with handsome plate-glass windows. The tiled entrance lobby and the pale green marble pillars led to long bars and ample space. There were customers at the tables, but not one who might be Sherlock Holmes. Just then, someone stood up and walked away from a table where he had sat alone.

He was a stout, florid-faced man, his red hair somewhat darkened by age. I did not recognize him as he passed me, and for that I give thanks! I should surely have greeted him instinctively and given the game away. He was some years older than when I had last seen him, and it was something in his eyes rather than in his face that prompted my recollection. Mr. Jabez Wilson!

In the scrapbooks of our investigations, which I have compiled over the years, Mr. Jabez Wilson brought us one of our first cases, the affair of the Reheaded League. That league proved to be a cover for the most ingenious and ruthless gang of bank robbers. Sherlock Holmes had saved Jabez Wilson from being unwittingly implicated in the crime and had earned him a modest reward from the bank’s insurers. Mr. Wilson had professed eternal indebtedness to his benefactor. It was not the least surprising if he had given shelter to Sherlock Holmes at 23 Denmark Square in his present hour of need.

We passed as if we were strangers. I sat with my glass of ale and listened to the barroom piano playing ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.’ On the buttoned leather of the seat beside me lay a discarded copy of the
Racing Times
. I glanced at it without picking it up. It had been folded open at a page on which someone had underlined a horse for the 3:30 at Cheltenham. The horse was Noli Me Tangere and I had no doubt that the underlining was Mr. Wilson’s.

Noli me tangere: ‘Do not touch me,’ or in the famous regimental motto, ‘Do not come near me.’ Thus I received my instructions. I finished my glass of ale, drew out my watch to check the time, and walked down the City Road with the air of a man who has an appointment to keep. Presently I came to a doorway. Its brass plate promised an oculist. In the waiting room I inquired whether a member of the practice might be free to give my eyes an examination. Half an hour later and a guinea the poorer, I came out into the street again.

As I walked past the steps of Wesley’s Chapel with its statue of the great founder himself, I noticed an orphan flower girl with the last of her day’s offerings laid out on the cold stone, violets and wallflowers, roses and carnations, forced in hothouses for early sale. Her dark print dress was plain but not torn, and her shoes had seen better days. I judged she was about fifteen, and the barefoot child who hung about her, no doubt her sister, about eleven. Such children often share a single room with two or more other families in the Drury Lane tenements. The elder came forward, towards me, crying out, ‘Flowers! Pretty flowers! Here’s spring to a certainty! Twopence for a buttonhole! And it shall be twopence for my night’s lodging, not a dram of gin!’

I did not doubt her, but she was upon me before I could reply, touching my face.

‘Feel my hand, how cold it is.’

Without more ado, she began to pin a white carnation in the buttonhole of my lapel.

‘Only be careful how you undo it,’ she said, almost laughing now.

‘Take this, my poor girl.’

I drew my hand from my pocket and pressed a sovereign into her outstretched palm. She stared at it and cried, ‘The heavens be your honour’s resting place,’ then turned to her young sister. With such treasure, they could shut up shop, certain of a warm meal and bed.

Only be careful how you undo it! Most of the Baker Street Irregulars had sisters or female cousins as destitute as they. If this was not one of them, I thought, may I be shot.

I reached Baker Street and, despite my impatience, walked up the stairs from the sooty air and blackened brick of the railway as if I had all the time in the world. No one followed me, but one pair of eyes would surely be trained on our front door as I walked toward Regent’s Park. Once inside our sitting room, I closed the curtains, put up the gas, and drew the white carnation from my buttonhole. The stem was protected by a twist of silver foil. When I unwound it, the foil was lined by a slip of paper. On this, in diminutive letters, was a message.